Albuquerque Journal

First, you need to get a decent education

Industrial-era mindset won’t serve the high school students of today

- BY ROB WOOD LAS CRUCES RESIDENT

I realize climate (change) is all the rave, but public education and the ability to prosper as a result of it so overwhelms that drama but is left to politician­s to create study groups to ineffectiv­ely solve. Your paper is the perfect outreach platform to get the citizenry engaged in the real crisis our children and their children will face. In their futures they can adapt to climatic changes, but not if they are educationa­lly illprepare­d.

By all metrics every student who graduates out of our K-12 public education system today is unprepared to meet the changing demands of employment and re-education necessary to survive without assistance going on into the remainder of this century. In our state Legislatur­e there is all this scramble about early childhood education when those children will not even be entering the work force until 2034 for a high school graduate and 2038-2040 for a college graduate — assuming a relative degree can be obtained in four to six years. In theory those children will feasibly retire in 2090.

What about all the kids coming out of public ed between now and then? An entire generation and more lost to an industrial era mindset of education that serves educator jobs but not the children they are entrusted with. Policymake­rs cannot even make the needed change to school start times to meet the natural biometric rhythms that are proven to positively affect high school student ability to learn. It is all about the 8-5 job mentality of factory work.

The handwritin­g is on the wall and has been there for decades, but the powers that mandate our public education model are so engorged on themselves and their bureaucrac­y that they are unable to make any necessary change that are studentcen­tered with respect to those children’s adult selves’ ability to prosper and create decent standards of living for them and their families.

I hate to criticize without offering a solution-based resource, of which there are many. In 2007 Clayton Christense­n wrote “Disrupting Class,” a much-needed whack on the side of the head regarding that times have changed and will continue to change at an accelerati­ng rate. Whenever one points a finger in blame there are always three pointing back at themselves.

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